THE LATE GOTHIC  STYLE C.   I2$Q-C. I5OO
have existed. That appears from a passage in Piers Plowman. It means
a first step towards the desertion of the haU as the living-room and
dining-room of everybody, master and men. But nearly three cen-
turies had to pass by after Penshurst had been designed, before the
hall had finally become a vestibule and nothing else.
It took nearly as long to recover the principle of symmetry for
the English house which had governed the plans of Harlech and
Beaumaris with such splendid success* In the I4th and I5th centuries
a manor-house, or, for that matter, a French chateau and a Burg in
Germany, were picturesque agglomerations of rooms. Symmetry
did not go farther than that sometimes in the isth and early i6th

38.     COTHAY MANOR, SOMERSET, LATE I5TH CENTURY.
centuries one straight axis runs from the gate-house to the entrance
of the hall. But the hall was not the exact centre of the main block,
and its entrance was eccentric anyway. The gate-house, even when
it was in the middle of the outer front, did not separate identical
halves (fig. 38). The results of this undisturbed growth are in Britain,
as well as in France and Germany, extremely charming. But if one
enquires about strictly aesthetic qualities, they are certainly not as high
as those of Harlech.
A comparison between the English cathedral of the isth century
and the English parish church of the isth shows the same changes.
They arc largely due to social developments. A new class had come
into its own, the class responsible for the erection of the scores of
splendid parish churches in Germany and in the Netherlands, and
the class to which in France the business-minded royal admini-
strators of the William of Nogaret type, in Italy the Medici and their
friends and competitors and in Northern Germany the leaders of
the Hanseatic League belonged. In England Richard the Lion-
68